| |
| THE WONDER of the world is o’er: | |
| The magic from the sea is gone: | |
| There is no unimagined shore, | |
| No islet yet to venture on. | |
| The Sacred Hazels’ blooms are shed, | 5 |
| The Nuts of Knowledge harvested. | |
| |
| Oh, what is worth this lore of age | |
| If time shall never bring us back | |
| Our battle with the gods to wage | |
| Reeling along the starry track. | 10 |
| The battle rapture here goes by | |
| In warring upon things that die. | |
| |
| Let be the tale of him whose love | |
| Was sighed between white Deirdre’s breasts, | |
| It will not lift the heart above | 15 |
| The sodden clay on which it rests. | |
| Love once had power the gods to bring | |
| All rapt on its wild wandering. | |
| |
| We shiver in the falling dew, | |
| And seek a shelter from the storm: | 20 |
| When man these elder brothers knew | |
| He found the mother nature warm, | |
| A hearth fire blazing through it all, | |
| A home without a circling wall. | |
| |
| We dwindle down beneath the skies, | 25 |
| And from ourselves we pass away: | |
| The paradise of memories | |
| Grows ever fainter day by day. | |
| The shepherd stars have shrunk within, | |
| The world’s great night will soon begin. | 30 |
| |
| Will no one, ere it is too late, | |
| Ere fades the last memorial gleam, | |
| Recall for us our earlier state? | |
| For nothing but so vast a dream | |
| That it would scale the steeps of air | 35 |
| Could rouse us from so vast despair. | |
| |
| The power is ours to make or mar | |
| Our fate as on the earliest morn, | |
| The Darkness and the Radiance are | |
| Creatures within the spirit born. | 40 |
| Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might | |
| Forget how we imagined light. | |
| |
| Not yet are fixed the prison bars; | |
| The hidden light the spirit owns | |
| If blown to flame would dim the stars | 45 |
| And they who rule them from their thrones: | |
| And the proud sceptred spirits thence | |
| Would bow to pay us reverence. | |
| |
| Oh, while the glory sinks within | |
| Let us not wait on earth behind, | 50 |
| But follow where it flies, and win | |
| The glow again, and we may find | |
| Beyond the Gateways of the Day | |
| Dominion and ancestral sway. | |
| |
